By

April 15, 2004

As one who regards Gerry Ford as our greatest President (least time served, least damage done, husband of Betty, plus Stevens as his contribution to the Supreme Court), I’d always imagined the man from Grand Rapids would never be surpassed in sheer slowness of thought. When a reporter asked Ford a question it was like watching that great sequence in Rossellini’s film about Louis XIV, when a shouted command is relayed at a stately pace through a dozen intermediaries from the kitchen to the royal ear. In Ford’s case, to watch a message negotiate the neural path from ear to cortex was to see a hippo wade through glue.

But I think Bush has Ford beat. Had he ever made a mistake, the reporter asked at that White House press conference. The President’s face remained composed, masking the turmoil and terror raging within, as his cerebrum went into gridlock. It should have been easy for him. Broad avenues of homely humility beckoned. “John, no man can stand before his Creator as I do each day and say he is without error…” Reagan would have hit the ball out of the park. But the President froze. He said he’d have to think it over.

Behind all the liberal hysteria over Bush as a demon of monstrous, Hitlerian proportions, I get the sense of a certain embarrassment, that the man is bringing the imperial office into disrepute. Hence we are served up those plaintive invocations of the distress of “America’s allies,” to be cured by a competent steward of empire like John Kerry. But should not all opponents of the American Empire’s global reach rejoice that Bush has sown confusion in the alliance? Would not the world be a safer and conceivably a better place if the allies saw separate paths as the sounder option? Gabriel Kolko, that great historian of American Empire, has been arguing powerfully (most recently in our CounterPunch newsletter) to this effect, and I agree with him.

With leadership of barely conceivable arrogance and incompetence (Paul Bremer alone is a case study in the decline in quality of American leadership in the past fifty years), the United States has managed the amazing feat of uniting Iraqis in detestation of its presence, and of leaving itself with zero palatable options. Amid this bloody disaster, with popular distaste for the occupation of Iraq swelling up in the polls, Kerry, with McCain at his elbow, has been goading Bush into sending more troops. As a prospective rationalizer of empire, Kerry sends forth the word that the Democrats are the Second Party of War.

With hardly a backward–or forward–look, the bulk of the surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflect debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. The capitulation of the left–a necessarily catchall word–is almost without precedent. By accepting the premises and practices of party unity, the left has negated the reasons for its own existence.

Let me produce a rabbit from its hat. I wrote that last paragraph, the one beginning “with hardly a backward look,” with Andrew Kopkind in a piece we did for The Nation in the summer of 1984, about Walter Mondale’s candidacy, where we noted the party’s commitment to “the essential elements of Reaganism: continued military expansion…further degradation of the welfare system, denial of black demands for equity and unqualified submission to the imperatives of the corporate system.” Any words you think should be changed?

In line with these same imperatives of the corporate system, Kerry announced on April 7 that his primary economic policy initiative would be deficit reduction. Welcome back, Robert Rubin, the man who ran Clinton’s economic policy on behalf of Wall Street. Kerry’s economic advisers, Roger Altman and Gene Sperling, acknowledge that they consult with Rubin all the time. If you still foolishly believe that the economy in Clinton time was properly guided for the long-termbenefit of the many, as opposed to short-term bonanzas for the wealthy few, I strongly urge you to read Robert Pollin’s Contours of Descent, which I hailed here last November.

Deficit reduction will do nothing to directly promote the growth of jobs, which is the fundamental problem in the economy now. As Pollin just remarked to me, “It is also a political disaster for the Democrats to again latch on to deficit reduction rather than jobs as their major economic theme. Even if Rubin were right about deficit reduction stimulating growth of GDP, what is clear in the current ‘recovery’ is that GDP growth alone does not promote job growth. That’s exactly what we mean by the ‘jobless recovery.’ The Democrats should instead be talking about a major jobs program, through refinancing of state and local government spending in education, health and social welfare.”

Kerry’s other shoe, war on the deficit as well as war in Iraq, has a more sinister import. Deficits aren’t intrinsically bad, and the current one is scarcely unparalleled in recent US economic history. But Bush’s deficits, amassed in the cause of tax breaks for the very rich and war abroad, provide the premise of a fiscal crisis to starve social spending. It’s the Greenspan Two-Step: Endorse the tax cuts, then say, as the Fed chairman did in February, that the consequent deficits require the evisceration of Social Security. Remember, Bill Clinton was all set to start privatizing Social Security, until the allurements of the divine Monica postponed the onslaught.

There are progressive ways to close the deficit. For example, Pollin reckons that if we imposed a very small tax on all financial transactions–i.e., all stock, bond and derivative trades, starting with a 0.5 percent tax on stocks and scaling the others appropriately–we could raise roughly $100 billion right there, or roughly 20 percent of next year’s projected deficit, even if we also assume financial market trading fell by an implausibly large 50 percent as a result of the tax.

A tax on financial transactions? Now you’re talking, but not about anything you might expect from the Democratic Party or John Kerry.

Alexander Cockburn Alexander Cockburn, The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist and one of America's best-known radical journalists, was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland. He graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature and language.
After two years as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, he worked at the New Left Review and The New Statesman, and co-edited two Penguin volumes, on trade unions and on the student movement.
A permanent resident of the United States since 1973, Cockburn wrote for many years for The Village Voice about the press and politics. Since then he has contributed to many publications including The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal (where he had a regular column from 1980 to 1990), as well as alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

He has written "Beat the Devil" since 1984.

He is co-editor, with Jeffrey St Clair, of the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch(http://www.counterpunch.org) which have a substantial world audience. In 1987 he published a best-selling collection of essays, Corruptions of Empire, and two years later co-wrote, with Susanna Hecht, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (both Verso). In 1995 Verso also published his diary of the late 80s, early 90s and the fall of Communism, The Golden Age Is In Us. With Ken Silverstein he wrote Washington Babylon; with Jeffrey St. Clair he has written or coedited several books including: Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs and the Press; The Politics of Anti-Semitism; Imperial Crusades; Al Gore, A User's Manual; Five Days That Shook the World; and A Dime's Worth of Difference, about the two-party system in America.